The Top 5 Reasons To Use Flowcharts

Sometimes it's more effective to visualize something graphically that it is to describe it with words. That
is the essence of what flowcharts do for you. Flowcharts explain a process clearly through symbols and text.
Moreover, flowcharts give you the gist of the process flow in a single glance. The following are some of the
more salient reasons to use flowcharts.

Excel Flowchart Wizard

Process Documentation / Training Materials

Another common use for flowcharts is to create process documentation. Although this reason overlaps with
regulatory and quality management requirements (below), many non-regulated businesses use flowcharts for their
documentation as well. These can range in form from high-level procedures to low-level, detailed work
instructions.

You may think that this applies mainly to large organizations, but small companies can greatly benefit from
flowcharting their processes as well. Small enterprises need to be nimble and organized. Standardizing their
processes is a great way to achieve this. In fact, the popular entrepreneurial book The E-Myth Revisited: Why
Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber is based on the fact that small
businesses are more likely to succeed if they treat their operations like a franchise. in a nutshell, this means
standardizing and documenting their business processes. There's no better way to do that than with flowcharts,
right?

Training materials are often created using flowcharts because they're visually stimulating and easy to
understand. A nicely laid out flowchart will gain and hold the reader's attention when a block of text will
often fail.

Workflow Management and Continuous Improvement

Workflows don't manage themselves. To ensure that you are meeting your customers' needs, you need to take
control of your business processes. The first step to workflow management is to define the current state of your
processes by creating an "As-Is Flowchart". That allows you to analyze your processes for waste and
inefficiency. After you have identified areas for process improvement, you can then craft new flowcharts to
document the leaner processes.

Programming

Information technology played a big influence on the use and spread of flowcharts in the 20th century. While
Dr. W. Edwards Deming was advocating their use in quality management, professionals in the data processing world
were using them to flesh out their programming logic. Flowcharts were a mainstay of procedural programming,
however, and with the advent of object oriented programming and various modeling tools, the use of flowcharts
for programming is no longer as commonplace as it once was.

That said, even with in the scope of object oriented programming, complex program logic can be modeled
effectively using a flowchart. Moreover, diagramming the user's experience as they navigate through a program is
a valuable prerequisite prior to designing the user interface. So flowcharts still have their place in the world
of programming.

Troubleshooting Guides

Most of us have come across a troubleshooting flowchart at one time or another. These are usually in the form
of Decision Trees that progressively narrow the range of possible solutions based on a series of criteria. The
effectiveness of these types of flowcharts depends on how neatly the range of problems and solutions can fit
into a simple True/False diagnosis model. A well done troubleshooting flowcharts can cut the problem solving
time greatly.

Regulatory and Quality Management Requirements

Your business processes may be subject to regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which
requires that your accounting procedures be clearly defined and documented. An easy way to do this is to create
accounting flowcharts for all your accounting processes.

Similarly, your organization may fall under certification requirements for quality management systems - such
as ISO 9000, TS 16949, or one of the many others. In such environments, flowcharts are not only useful but in
certain clauses they are actually mandated.

Nicholas Hebb

Spreadspeed Excel Utilities

Spreadspeed is a time saving Excel add-in for performing operations on workbooks, worksheets, ranges, tables, text, numbers, dates, data, and more. The Spreadspeed auditing features are a set of risk assessment and error reduction tools for ensuring the quality of your spreadsheets.

FlowBreeze Flowchart Software

FlowBreeze is an Excel add-in that automates the steps to create a flowchart. It simplifies the task of creating flowcharts by converting your text into flowchart shapes, automatically applying styles, routing connector arrows, positioning symbols, and much more.